Leur Pays

David Kennedy

Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy by Desmond King
Harvard, 388 pp, £29.95, June 2000, ISBN 0 674 00088 9

A mutter of disquiet undulated through the clan-proud, old-stock Daughters of the American Revolution when Franklin Roosevelt once impishly greeted them as ‘my fellow immigrants’. Roosevelt later elaborated: ‘All of our people all over the country – except the pure-blooded Indians – are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.’ Strictly speaking, even the exception for Indians might be disallowed, since they, too, migrated to the American continents from elsewhere.

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Vol. 23 No. 4 · 22 February 2001 » David Kennedy » Leur Pays (print version)
pages 24-25 | 3104 words

Letters

From Cal Winslow

In his essay on immigration to the US, David Kennedy (LRB, 22 February) 'disallows' the Native American experience, dismisses the recent demands of African Americans, and then effaces the actual ordeal of immigration, concluding that some forty million people 'voluntarily' entered the United States during the 20th century, where 'for the most part', they 'thrived' – 'accommodated', he tells us, without much 'open social conflict'. Astonishingly, he then offers up the history of the US as a lesson for others, assuring us that no new nativism is in sight, not with 'the California economy … to put it mildly, in recovery'. As evidence, he refers us to a tradition of 'American universalism' and 'an actively inclusionist ethos' of which 'Franklin Roosevelt was at once champion, agent and political beneficiary.'

Ignore for the moment the rather more difficult passages of the European immigrants (the Louisiana lynchings of Italians in the 1890s, for example). Today 'slave markets' like those seen in the Bronx during the 1930s are ubiquitous in California (they may even be found in Palo Alto): streets where Latino men line up at dawn, offering themselves as day labourers. Will the new immigrants thrive? I hope so, but let's not forget white 'separatism' – sociologists these days call it 'hyper-segregation' – especially as crashing hi-tech profits, power shortages and rolling blackouts have now brought the California economy back down to earth.

Cal Winslow
Mendocino, California

From Gwynne Nettler

David Kennedy omits an important adjective when he describes California's Proposition 187 as 'a ballot initiative which in 1994 sought to deny immigrants access to public services such as hospitals and schools' (LRB, 22 February). The omitted qualifier is 'illegal'. One argument for the initiative was that, while 'undocumented aliens' cost each legal household in California $1178 per year (not 'per native-born California household', as Kennedy writes), these 'illegals' pay no taxes. Of course, many of them provide services, but it is a criminal offence for Americans to employ them, as some aspiring politicos have learned.

Gwynne Nettler
San Diego, California